October 28, 2005

Miered in doubt

Now that she has withdrawn her name from the Supreme Court nomination process, what will
the
linguistic legacy of Harriet Miers be? Will she be remembered as a
supposed stickler
in matters grammatical who ran afoul of subject-verb
agreement in her first public statement as a nominee? Or will history
record Miers' punctuation style, either her "trouble
with commas" in written responses to Senate questions or her exuberant
use of exclamation
points in correspondence with President Bush when he was governor of Texas?

Perhaps Trent Lott is right to wonder,
"In a month, who will remember the name Harriet Miers?" But an
Associated Press article
suggests that Miers' lasting legacy will only be her name, converted into a
verb in the manner of Robert Bork, her predecessor in nomination
termination (or "SCOTUS interruptus," as several wags have termed it).
Like Bork, Miers has been eponymized primarily in the passive voice:
Bork got Borked, Miers got Miered. Though Miered lacks the phonesthemic punch
of Borked, it does of course
have the benefit of being a pun on mired.
Semantically there's a distinction too, according to the blogospheric
sources quoted by the AP:

A contributor to The Reform Club, a
right-leaning blog, wrote that
to get "borked" was "to be unscrupulously torpedoed by an opponent,"
while to get "miered" was to be "unscrupulously torpedoed by an ally."

S.T. Karnick, co-editor of The Reform Club,
elaborated.

"If you have a president who is willing to
instigate a big
controversy, the prospect of being 'borked' will be the major
possibility," he said. "But if you have a president who is always
trying to get consensus, then it's much more likely that nominees will
get 'miered.'"

On The National Review Online, a
conservative site, a contributor
suggested that "to mier" means "to put your own allies in the most
untenable position possible based upon exceptionally bad
decision-making."

You don't have to fail in the Supreme Court nomination process to
get your own verb. Justice David Souter was also eponymized, though it was
well after his elevation to the Court. When the reticent John Roberts was announced as Bush's choice to fill Sandra Day O'Connor's anticipated vacancy, there was talk of him being Soutered.
As CNN
explained, "to 'Souter' has come to mean to pick a
candidate without knowing much about him." It is presented as the
opposite of getting Borked;
where Bork had a voluminous record of legal opinions, Souter was an
enigma at the time of his nomination by Bush Sr. and thus was difficult
to attack during Senate questioning. But conservatives have also used Soutered to refer to the betrayal
they felt when Souter joined with moderate to liberal opinions on the
bench. "Won't get Soutered again," they vowed.

I note that one of the potential replacements for Miers, according
to the New
York Times, is Judge Diane Sykes of the Seventh Circuit. Is it too
early to wonder if conservatives would be Syked about her nomination?